When Lenin and his Bolshevik
(Communist) party seized power in Russia in October 1917, they expected their
action to be the signal for revolutions in the more advanced European
countries. When this did not
happen, they faced an unexpected problem:
what to do with their success.
During the civil war after 1917, the Communists adopted a policy of
taking over factories and other enterprises, while leaving peasants in control of
the farmland they had seized in 1917.
In 1921, Lenin announced his New Economic Policy (NEP), a partial
return to capitalist economic practices.
Peasants would be allowed to keep most of the profits from their work,
and small private businesses would be allowed to produce consumer goods for the
population. The Communist government
would keep control of the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy—key
sectors, including most heavy industries and public services. During this period, the heavy-handed security
measures taken during the civil war were relaxed somewhat and a fair amount of intellectual
and cultural freedom was permitted.
After Lenin’s death in
1923, a struggle for power developed among the other Communist
leaders. Trotsky, the most prominent of
them, argued for a radical program of forced industrialization to make
the Soviet Union an advanced industrial power as quickly as possible, while his
opponents objected that this would require the use of force against a reluctant
population. By the end of the 1920s,
the previously obscure Joseph Stalin had outmaneuvered Trotsky and the
other ‘Old Bolsheviks’ and made himself the new strong man of the regime.
Before coming to power, Stalin had
opposed Trotsky’s ideas, but he now reversed course and made them official
policy, even as he forced Trotsky into exile.
In 1929, he announced the First Five-Year Plan, under which all
remaining private property in the Soviet Union would be expropriated and heavy
industry would be developed according to a centrally controlled program. In the countryside, peasants resisted the collectivization
of agriculture by slaughtering their livestock and refusing to move to the
new state-owned collective farms. The
result was a widespread famine, in which several million people died, but
Stalin refused to alter his policies.
Forced to work long hours under brutal conditions, workers did succeed
in building new factories, power plants, and mines. Stalin’s policies made the Soviet Union a major industrial power,
but at a very high human cost.
As his plans began to succeed,
Stalin adopted even more drastic measures to control the Soviet
population. In 1934, he inaugurated the
period of the Great Terror, during which millions of Soviet citizens
were arrested, sentenced for imaginary crimes, and either executed or sent to a
vast network of prison camps, the “Gulag archipelago,” spread across the
country. Stalin eliminated almost all
the senior members of the Communist Party, the “Old Bolsheviks” who
remembered when the movement had not been totally controlled by a single
person. Tortured and intimidated, many
of these prominent leaders were executed after spectacular public show
trials during which they confessed to unimaginable crimes against the
Soviet Union. At the same time, huge
public demonstrations and propaganda campaigns made it appear that the entire
population supported Stalin’s regime.
Outsiders did not understand the extent of Stalin’s terror, and often took the regime’s propaganda at face value. At a time when democratic governments and capitalist economies in the west seemed to be on the brink of collapse, Stalin’s Soviet Union appeared to be making unprecedented economic progress. Communist parties in the western countries organized support for the Soviet Union and claimed that they were the only effective opponents of fascist movement’s like Mussolini’s and Hitler’s. Because of its apparent concern for workers and the poor, Communism attracted many idealistic supporters in other countries who thought they had to choose between it and fascism.
I. From Lenin to Stalin
A. The Russian Civil War
B. Communist Policies in the 1920s
1. the New Economic Policy
2. the great debate
II. Stalin and Soviet Totalitarianism
A. The collectivization crisis (1929-33)
1. the 5-Year Plan
2. the expropriation of the peasants and the great famine
B. The Great Terror (1934-38)
1. the ‘gulag’ system
2. the liquidation of the Old Bolsheviks
3. the show trials
III. Communism in the wider world
A. ‘Socialism in one country’
B. The Comintern and the world communist movement
1. the appeal of Communism
2. the Popular Front era
Stalin
explains the need for forced industrialization (1931): “It is sometimes asked whether it is not
possible to slow down the tempo a bit, to put a check on the movement. No,
comrades, it is not possible! The tempo
must not be reduced! On the contrary,
we must increase it as much as is within our powers and possibilities. This is dictated to us by our obligations to
the workers and peasants of the USSR.
This is dictated to us by our obligations to the working class of the
whole world…. We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced
countries. We must make good this
distance in ten years. Either we do it,
or they crush us.”
A
one-time supporter of Stalin remembers the mood of the 1930s: “We were raised
as the fanatical [believers] of a new creed, the only true religion of
scientific socialism. The party became
our church militant, bequeathing to all mankind eternal salvation, eternal
peace and the bliss of an earthly paradise…
The works of Marx, Engels and Lenin were accepted as holy writ, and
Stalin was the infallible high priest…. We believed him unconditionally.”
The
Armenian poet G. Maari describes his trial during Stalin’s Terror: “The
Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union is in session. I confess to terrorist acts, to the wish to
separate Armenia from the Soviet Union and unite her to the imperialist
camp. I intended to kill Beria… The trial was a closed one, the trial lasted
three minutes… I was condemned to ten years’ deprivation of liberty… ‘How many
did you get?’ he [a friend] asked in a whisper. ‘Ten years.’ ‘Thank God,
you’ve got off lightly…”